Reviews and reviewers can vary. In reply to a new book or a new film the reviewer has different motives – be they professional, journalistic or political/polemical. When I read Allan Armstrong’s review of my own book, The Red and the Green – A Portrait of John MacLean, it felt like a different kind of review. It was personal but certainly not in the way one would expect. It was refreshingly personal. It was not in any way, shape or form a personal attack as you would usually associate with “personal” in that sense. It was, however, a personal reflection of the man whom my book is about and who has inspired Allan throughout his adult political life. It also prompted a personal reflection of Allan’s political journey and it is important that this started Allan’s review. Continue reading “STILL TALKING ABOUT JOHN MACLEAN”

Review of The Red and the Green – Portrait of John Maclean by Gerard Cairns

Gerard Cairns has recently published his informative and challenging new book, The Red and the Green – A Portrait of John Maclean. I have known Gerry since the early 1990s and I would find it hard to call him Gerard, so I will use Gerry for the rest of this review.

The book’s title reveals the two main aspects of Gerry’s assessment of John Maclean. The Red and the Green highlights Gerry’s research into ‘Red’ John and his relationship with the ‘Green’ or Irish community on Clydeside .[1] A Portrait of John Maclean examines Maclean the political activist and family man. It raises questions about how Socialists organise and relate to others, especially their partners and families. When assessing Maclean, Gerry brings his own personal experience to bear. “This has been a very personal portrait of a man I have researched, studied, lectured on, debated for a long time.” [2] Thus Gerry’s book is viewed through the prism of his own life of political activism. Continue reading “ALLAN ARMSTRONG REVIEWS ‘THE RED AND THE GREEN’ BY GERARD CAIRNS”

This is the second article on this blog addressing the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution (see http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2017/10/21/national-liberation-and-bolshevism-reconsidered-a-view-from-the-borderlands/). It suggests that a wider focus should be taken, situating this event in the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave. This means and looking carefully at other places, showing how Latvia, Finland and Ukraine contributed to this wave. It looks how decisions taken by the Bolsheviks following the timeline of revolution in Russia sometimes had the effect of thwarting the timelines of revolution elsewhere. This had negative consequences for the international revolution.

This contribution is taken from is taken from Volume 4, Internationalism form Below: Communists, Nation-States and Nationalism during the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave, by Allan Armstrong.

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO SET UP A POST-NATIONAL WORLD ORDER

A. DIFFERING TIMELINES OF REVOLUTION

i) April 1916 to March 1921 or ‘October’ 1917 to August 1991?

History records that the key political date of the last century was October 25th, 1917. The consequences of the events, which happened on this day, determined a great deal of world politics for more than seventy years – up until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Elsewhere, in the Western imperial-dominated world October 25th was marked as November 8th. The last Russian Provisional Government of 1917 was overthrown on this date. Nevertheless, the date became universally characterised as the day the ‘October’ Revolution began. This name stuck despite the fact that the victors, the Bolsheviks, soon changed the Russian calendar from the Old Style (O.S.) used in Tsarist Russia to the New Style (N.S.) used in the rest of the Western world. History also places the location of the key events of this day in Petrograd. This city’s name too has been subject to change, earlier from St. Petersburg to Petrograd, then later to Leningrad, and today back to St. Petersburg. Continue reading “THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO SET UP A POST-NATIONAL WORLD ORDER”

In the run-up to the centenary of the October Revolution in Russia, talks and seminars have been arranged and new books and articles have been published. Some of this work has been done to uphold old orthodoxies, but there has also been more critical work looking at the Russian Revolution in the wider context of the 1916-21/3 International Revolutionary Wave to see if there were aspects of this period that have been neglected, which could inform today’s struggles. One of these works is the article written by Eric Blanc and published in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Eric is an activist and historian in Oakland, California.

As one reviewer of this article John Riddell explains, this article “obliges us to rethink many long-held assumptions about the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, as well as the development of Marxist approaches to national liberation, peasant struggle, permanent revolution, and the emancipation of women.”

NATIONAL LIBERATION AND BOLSHEVISM RECONSIDERED – A VIEW FROM THE BORDERLANDS

Helsinki, Finland during the 1905 Revolution

The following paper analyzes the socialist debates on the national question up through 1914. I argue that an effective strategy of anti-colonial Marxism was first put forward by the borderland socialists, not the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his comrades lagged behind the non-Russian Marxists on this crucial issue well into the Civil War—and this political weakness helps explain the Bolshevik failure to build roots among dominated peoples. Consequently, the Bolsheviks were either too numerically weak and/or indifferent to national aspirations to successfully lead socialist revolutions in the borderlands, facilitating the isolation of the Russian workers’ government and the subsequent rise of Stalinism. Continue reading “NATIONAL LIBERATION AND BOLSHEVISM RECONSIDERED – A VIEW FROM THE BORDERLANDS”

As part of our celebration the 1916 Easter Rising, we are posting two new articles. The first is by Allan Armstrong (RCN), and addresses Lenin’s response to in his Irish Rebellion of 1916 (which is also posted). The second comes from the latest issue of Socialist Democracy (Ireland) and looks at the situation in Ireland today, 100 years after the Rising.

1. LENIN AND THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916

The Dublin GPO during the 1916 Rising, painted by Robert Ballagh

In the midst of the First World War, following the Dublin 1916 Easter Rising, Lenin returned to the issue of national self-determination. He had already addressed this at the beginning of the year in The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination. Immediately before the Rising, he had also gone on to write The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up.Continue reading “THE CENTENARY OF THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916”

Allan Armstrong (RCN) prepared a talk for the Conference of Socialist Economists Day School held in the Out of the Blue Centre in Edinburgh on June 21st. The article below incorporates some of the discussion points that were raised. It provides asocialist republican analysis of the British Left and the case for an ‘internationalism from below’ alternative in the Scottish independence referendum campaign. This talk is also a chapter in the extended article, Making Plans For Nigel, which can be viewed at:- http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2014/06/26/making-plans-for-nigel/ A shortened version of this talk was also given as a contribution to the debate in the Left Unity Party – Glasgow South branch, on December 13th.

On the British Left, continued support for maintaining the UK state and for upholding the internationalist nature of all-British party and trade union organisation stems from their understanding of the British ruling class and the United Kingdom. They view these as having played a key historical role in replacing the older feudal order in these islands, and other pre-capitalist societies in many parts of the world.

The RCN has based much of its analysis of capitalism on the notions of exploitation and oppression, to which we counter the ideas of emancipation and liberation – hence the name of our main publication. However, we have been conducting discussions on capitalism’s third prop, alienation, and its antithesis, self-determination, understood in its widest sense. In the article below, by Allan Armstrong (RCN), which comes from Volume 1 of Internationalism From Below: Reclaiming a hidden communist tradition to challenge the nation state and capitalist empire, explores the relationships between exploitation, oppression and alienation, and between emancipation, liberation and self-determination.

Communists, and sometimes others on the Left, use three key terms to help us understand social relationships between human beings in class societies. These are exploitation, oppression and alienation.